This invention relates to heating systems for individual rooms and the like and more particularly to self-regulating baseboard heater systems.
Various devices and apparatus have been devised to maintain the temperature of a closed volume such as a room in a home, an office, or the like at a predetermined value. Radiators, space heaters, baseboard heaters, and the like have all been developed for such purposes.
Placement of these various types of heaters is influenced by the fact that the total heat loss from such a space consists of losses through windows and doors primarily and secondarily through the walls, ceiling and floor of the room. Such heaters are therefore usually placed near the floor adjacent the windows and, to a much lesser extent, near the doors. Since the losses through outside walls tend to be much greater than through other walls, prior baseboard heaters have been positioned almost exclusively on outside walls.
Baseboard heaters in common use have an elongated, finned metal sheath electric heating element, a channel-shaped front wall which shields the heating element from outside objects, interior baffles to limit the temperature of exposed parts of the heater, a back wall which is generally mounted flush against a building wall, and two end walls. Such heaters perform well, but they could be improved. For example, it would be desirable to decrease the cost of currently available baseboard heaters. Present baseboard heaters are also relatively complicated to install. And their appearance sometimes detracts from the appearance of a room. In addition, the presence of baseboard heaters has heretofore limited the placement of objects such as furniture in a room because the presence of such an object in front of a baseboard heater would block the heat from the heater. At present, baseboard heaters are placed near those structures which are predicted to have the greatest heat loss, such as windows and the outside walls, because this improves the comfort of people in the room. However, if the heat loss is significant at some point in the room other than where the baseboard heater is placed, the comfort of the user is greatly reduced. Present baseboard heaters also cause "wall streaking." The surface and air temperatures of these heaters are so high that dust and other air-borne particles can be carbonized by the heater and deposited as streaks of soot above the heater.